


Witches and Spymasters

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-04
Updated: 2014-04-04
Packaged: 2018-01-18 02:33:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1411753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The term "cackling" is by way of Terry Pratchett, and indicates a sort of megalomaniacal, high-camp madness to which witches of Discworld are subject. It seems almost certain to me that spies and spymasters in the Espionage thriller genre are similarly subject to the condition--thus providing the endless array of monumentally bug-f*ck villains in Bond films. </p><p>Love, Mycroft, Lestrade, all channeled by way of Mycroft in ordinary preventive therapy. If you care, the shrink in the story has been stolen from "The Thomas Crown Affair" as recently remade with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, with Faye Dunnaway as the elegant, beautifully coiffed and outrageously amused psychiatrist. I think anyone who can handle Thomas Crown can probably at least have a good go at Mycroft Holmes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Witches and Spymasters

It was, in its way, a sensual pleasure. Mycroft seldom admitted as much to himself, but he was nothing if not rigorous in his attempts to accurately assess his life and his weaknesses—and strengths. Knowing the pleasure he took in the morning rituals of rising, showering, shaving, dressing, eating his breakfast, and setting off for work allowed him to better understand his own nature…though that knowledge was revealed to no one he could avoid telling. That meant essentially everyone except Mycroft himself and the psychotherapist assigned to keep an eye on The British Government.

He’d been very careful to ensure he was assigned someone clever, strong, utterly reliable—and inclined to admire Mycroft’s eccentricities rather than critique them.

“I’m a screaming sensualist,” Mycroft had told her his first day in her office, after taking hours of assessment tests. “Complete basket case. Sight, scent, taste, touch, hearing: it’s a love-hate relationship. Gorgeous, every bit of it, until it overwhelms me. It’s a useful motivating factor, though. Makes it easy to build in my own reward systems.”

“I would think it might,” she’d replied with an amused smile. “It doesn’t tempt you into forbidden ways?”

“A man who can experience Nirvana in a perfect curl of double-fat fermented butter seldom needs to go haring after the Golden Apples of Desire,” Mycroft said. “I’m able to spread my ecstasy out over the day: a pot of perfectly brewed Keemun here, a ripe peach there, a good liver pate and a glass of cognac in the evening.”

“And sex?”

Mycroft shrugged and grimaced. “A bit perfunctory, I’m afraid. Sterile. But some sacrifices must be made, and it’s self-evident that intimacy is an exceptional threat to security in my line of work. So I make do with the sensual equivalent of cellophane-wrapped fast food. It…suffices. Fortunately my lifestyle doesn’t expose me to much in the way of temptation. I’m the wrong person entirely to pine after my PA, and it would take a doughtier cocksman than myself to develop much enthusiasm for bedding most of my fellow members of the Diogenes.” He closed his eyes and shuddered. “The very thought of Rutherford alone is enough to put a man off sex entirely for a fortnight.”

“Is it difficult to find ‘cellophane wrapped fast-food’ capable of providing you with a reasonable facsimile of a…lover?” She sounded dubious.

Mycroft frowned at her. “Excuse me? You mean…what?”

“Does a hired hand provide you with a sufficiently _interactive_ experience?” At his dumbfounded look, she said, firmly, “Do you feel properly _made love to?_ Or…” she paused, looking for a polite phrasing of her question.

Mycroft grimaced. “My dear, losing control of the event in the way you imply would defeat the purpose. I am not _made love to._ I take my pleasure, pay a highly respectful sum to reimburse my…associates…for the indignity, and that’s that.” At her slightly stunned look he sighed, and said, “Yes. Masturbation of a sort—the merest illusion of intimacy. But that’s rather the point, isn’t it? Intimacy’s just what I can’t risk, after all. Do be reasonable, my dear. At least I’m taking care of myself…and rather well, if I do say so.”

His therapist had sighed, and said, “I’d suggest you might have to develop a more satisfying solution to the problem someday—but I’d be lying. In truth, there are plenty of people who go through life with far less effective surrogacies.” She closed her notes and nodded. “Very well. But if the situation begins to pall on you, let me know. At some point many people do find a bit of intimacy a necessary luxury…as sensual as all your other little daily luxuries.”

He refused to ask her—or himself—how. His luxuries were already so satisfying.

He could have lived without the wakeup calls from Anthea, but her friendly voice was nonetheless an improvement on any alarm clock made, and her comforting reminders of why he had to get up when he did got him through any number of emergency calls he could happily have slept through otherwise. Then there was the slow stretch on the fine mattress under supple cotton sheets. The pad to the bathroom on smooth hardwood floors heated from below. The scorching drum of the shower on his head and neck and shoulders. The scent of fine milled soap, unscented, leaving his skin ready for his choice of cologne and aftershave. Tooth-brush, shave, hair product, and then the aforementioned scents—usually clean, simple scents of lime, rosemary, lavender, bergamot, but occasionally seductive, supple blends that whispered of crimson blossoms and the shriek of tropical birds.

Then the pleasure of vesting himself for the day. Boxers and vest, socks and sock garters, trousers and shirt and sleeve garters and weskit and jacket, tie and pocket square and carefully polished brogues. Each piece added another element to his armor. Each had a heft, a texture, even a scent of its own: clean cotton smelling hot and slightly scorched from the drier and the iron; linen likewise, though with a very slight vegetable funk that differed from cotton’s dry murmur. Wool-silk blend suiting with the faint trace of damp dog, barely there but identifiable if he sought it out. The smell of shoe-polish and wax. The slink of silk as he tied his tie. Then the choice of jewelry. His ring, of course, was a constant, but after that there was the choice of pocket watch and watch-chain and fob and stick-pin and collar bar and lapel pin. Which would he wear? How much was too much?

When at last he looked in his mirror, satisfied, he’d sated his senses even as he walled them away from the world. He was armored and immaculate and invulnerable and isolate. His clothing was both seduction—and shroud.

He was a work of art—and anyone who was anyone knew the rules of art: Don’t touch. Hands off. The museum guard is watching…

He’d told his therapist about it, once. She’d murmured, “Do you ever wonder if it would be as seductive to have it all stripped away?”

He’d snapped, “Whatever do you think I do come evening?” and she’d snorted and given him reprieve…

But in truth, he did occasionally wonder, and shoved the idea far from him as quickly as possible, lest it take up permanent residence and sour his solitary pleasures.

He did not allow his occasional paid companions to undress him. He was quite able to dress and undress himself.

He did like to look well for them, those cellophane wonders. He struggled with his diet and his exercise as much for them as for his professional standing. He feared the day he’d look in the eyes of any and see too clearly the ultimate fee offsetting the disappointment in the assignment. He worried, sometimes, that the day would inevitably come when no amount of effort could counter age and gravity and loss of hair.

How did ordinary people bear it, in their intimate little pair-bonded couples? The day one looked at the other, and both saw every minute of every day of every year they’d been together written in wrinkles and sags and pouched out bellies and mushy buttocks and spindle-shanks?

His therapist, well along in that procession to the grave, said with amusement, “That’s where the intimacy comes in—it outweighs the sags and bags, if you’re lucky. A hand on a breast can feel even more lovely when it’s a grand old hand on a well-loved breast, you see.”

He didn’t. Oh, he could imagine loving in spite of age…if he could love Sherlock in spite of malice, intransigence, addiction, and resentment, it wasn’t that hard to extend it from fraternal love to eros. It was being loved in return that seemed—implausible, and far too easily manipulated to his disadvantage.

He’d once read “Flowers for Algernon,” about a mentally handicapped man catapulted to genius through experimentation, only to have it all fade away, ending tragedy. It had given him nightmares of the most graphic sort for years—the kind from which he woke up sweating and ill and shaking, unable to return to sleep for fear of finding himself once again reduced to slowly worsening idiocy, able to see it coming but unable to escape it in the slightest.

How much worse, he wondered, to become accustomed to being loved and desired, only to see it fade? He’d already come too close to that a time or two in youth—experienced broken-heartedness. At least then he had been young, and able to believe both in his ability to love again—and the freedom that granted him to choose not to. He’d rejected love at the only time a man can and have any hope of believing it to be choice, not sour grapes and rationalization.

To love, and lose, and choose loneliness again? Now? Even he would be unable to summon up any sense of dignity from that sort of resignation tricked out as self-determination.

“You undervalue yourself,” his therapist said. She was an elegant woman—sleek and blonde and beautifully coiffed, with a witty mind of sufficient tensile strength as to make up for her obvious intellectual inferiority to him in pure deductive and analytical arenas. He could grudgingly concede that in her own areas of expertise she demonstrated high levels of genius: different areas of intelligence than his own.

Still, he could only disagree with her assessment. “I’m a realist,” he countered. “I’m an aging ginger with exceedingly peculiar social skills, too reserved and far too introverted, with a long nose, a short chin, a neck that would do an ostrich proud, and to add to it all I’m a governmental asset, which is simply never a good start for a personal relationship. So difficult to get past one’s date being a security risk…”

“You don’t just undervalue yourself, you vastly undervalue yourself,” she said with something between a chuckle and a scold. “There are people who would find you…” she grinned mischievously, “ _adorable._ Simply adorable.” She laughed outright, then, as he sputtered.

“Someday,” she said, “it would be good for you to let go. All that control…all that reserve. What would it be like, do you think, to be unwrapped: tailored jacket, fancy weskit, silk tie, bespoke linen shirt? Jewelry removed a piece at a time and put in a bowl on someone’s dresser to wait for you? What—“

“Dangerous,” he said, cutting her off. “I think it would feel dangerous.”

“Yes,” she said. “It would, wouldn’t it? But, then, danger is Mycroft Holmes’ stock-in-trade, isn’t it? Something you face daily.”

He sulked the rest of the session and willfully cancelled the next two, refusing to come back until his pique had worn off. When he arrived at last, she gave him no ground at all, saying instead, “Who do you flee? Which ones threaten you most?”

He frowned at her.

“You must know,” she said. “Or have you cut yourself off so completely you aren’t even aware of wanting?”

He stalked to his place on the sofa, and settled, then sighed. “One. Only one.”

“Inside your world, or out?” she asked, and both knew she was asking if the person was within the sheltered walls of the intelligence community—a civilian, or a fellow spy.

“Inside,” he said.

“Under your command?”

“Seconded,” he replied. “We…bicker sometimes over whether he’s my subordinate or not.” He grinned in ironic amusement. “if he’s my subordinate, he can be a dreadfully obstinate one.”

“Does he know you’re attracted?”

He shrugged. “Probably,” he said, then, conceding the point. “He’s not stupid…and I suspect I’m too careful around him for him to miss the point.”

“And him? Is the interest returned?”

He closed his eyes, then, and refused to answer.

“I see,” she said. Then, “Consider it, someday. It would be good to talk about something besides the pleasures of a morning shower and the process of tying a tie in a Windsor knot.”

“No,” he said, feeling the terror of nightmare waking creep up his spine and raise the hair on his arms in goosebumps. “No. It would not.”

Sometimes he wondered why MI6 paid good money to have him hand all his vulnerabilities to the woman…a security risk, wasn’t she? But then he watched even the well-cared for crack, and he knew the answer. Spymasters, like witches, tended to start cackling if left alone too long. She was his insurance against cackling…

“If you can face danger professionally, you can probably weather a bit of it in your private life,” she pointed out.

“And what would that gain me?” he asked, grimly. “One more hostage to fortune? One more distraction? One more angry dependent? Isn’t Sherlock enough for one life?”

“Sherlock doesn’t offer much return,” she pointed out. “Not of a personal nature.”

“Caring is not an advantage.”

“Yes, yes. I’ve heard it from you before. I do seem to recall pointing out that it’s not always like caring _for Sherlock_ you know.”

Then she told him to work on ideation exercises for the next fortnight…which, having reviewed her instructions, struck him as merely high-toned language for having a few erotic fantasies. He considered refusing, then relented—only to find he couldn’t imagine what he should imagine.

What would happen if he wasn’t with cellophane fast-food? What would happen if he wasn’t in control, calling every shot, determining every position, timing every stroke?

He could get no farther than imagining a hand sliding around the back of his neck—a face bending toward his to give the kiss he never himself gave during his safe and sanitary sexual encounters.

“Curiosity ought to count for something,” his therapist said.

He scowled at her.

“Give it a chance,” she said.

“There’s nothing to be discussed,” he said. “My life doesn’t even leave room for the opportunity to arise.”

Until it did.

Until one night, working late, in the dim office, with Lestrade on the other side of the desk, they both paused, and their eyes caught, and failed to glance away.

oOo

A kiss can go anywhere. It can tickle along lips so long unkissed they forget what it is to breathe another person’s breath, swallow their sighs, trace love-songs on the tip of their tongue. A kiss can wander down a jawline, or slip silently up to a brow. A kiss can turn violent, two hungry mouths trying to devour their own need, howling against each other…or it can soften, sweeten, brushing stardust across cheekbones and placing filigreed arabesques across eyelids. You can’t control a kiss…

And hands…

Mycroft discovered that there was nothing so terrifying and wonderful as a hand cradling his bum, fingers slipping between his thighs, their track not quite guessable, their pace a complete mystery commanding his every sense and claiming his complete focus.

To be made love to…

It was to open a book with no idea of the genre, no certainty of the ending….and to hang upon every word, praying for luck, but even more for integrity, that the end might be fitting and the protagonists worthy.

It was to sell one’s patrimony for a handful of beans, and to fling them out the window into the field beyond, and to wake in the morning to a beanstalk. It was to climb up in wonder, unsure if you could trust the clouds…and to find marvels and risk giants and come fleeing back home with a singing harp and a goose that laid golden eggs, laughing all the way.

It was to surrender control.

It was to learn the seduction of having one’s weskit tossed over a chair, and one’s collar-bar sworn over most mightily, and one’s watch-chain snapped at the jumper ring because rushing fingers didn’t know where the catch connected to the button. It was to forgive every depredation, because what was a rumpled weskit and a bent collar-bar and a snapped jumper ring so long as there were shaking hands and harried, frustrated laughter and eyes that shone with need, not patient tolerance and cooperation—

Being made love to was to sweat without a shower nearby. To come and only afterward wonder if there was a flannel in the loo to deal with the mess. It was to realize the only soap was institutional and smelled of some chemist’s idea of a field of lavender…It was to find that funny, a sensual delight of a lunatic sort.

It was to lie on wool carpet as someone connected the constellations on one’s shoulders, and to laugh and feel beloved…and to fear losing it.

It was indeed to wake up in terror at the “Flowers for Algernon” dread of losing in slow motion, of seeing it all slip away and be helpless to change a thing.

It was to be held and told that one could survive even that—but that if possible…

If possible Lestrade—not just “a lover,” but Lestrade—would make sure Mycroft—not just “one,” but Mycroft himself—would never have to survive it.

oOo

“Well,” his therapist told him, later, with a smile. “You seem to have done pretty well after all.”

He nodded, and then said, “I didn’t realize, you know…”

“Realize what?” she asked.

He sighed. “How close I’d come to cackling,” he said. “I really didn’t know.”

She looked at him soberly, and said, softly, “My dear…you don’t understand. You _were_ cackling. Over the edge and gone. I wasn’t sure how much longer you were going to keep functioning. Welcome back.”


End file.
